Jumping crocs!

Our last night in the tent was on the edge of Kakadu National Park. It was raining so we camped under the shelter of the BBQ area! We had to put the tent down early before people started getting up and wanting to use the kitchen area!

On the drive to Darwin we stopped at the jumping crocs river cruise! It was brilliant! The Aussie skipper dangled pork chops out the side of the boat and made the massive saltwater crocodiles jump out the water to get them. We were amazed the crocs could jump so high, it felt like some might jump into the boat! Apparently most of the crocs have missing limbs from fighting each other, but we didn't notice anything missing, more focused on the jaw region! This one was 5.5 metres long and called Nifty:

The skipper wasn't quick enough with one pork chops and he lost it to the sharks who were also in the river! He also threw meat to the big kites who often caught it before it reached the water.

And now we're in Darwin trying to get our car sold before we leave on Wednesday. It's a bit tight, but fingers crossed.

Alessia and Kakadu

Even though cyclone Alessia was kilometres away, it has bought plenty of rain and storms to the Northern Territory of Australia. We went canoeing in the rain in Katherine Gorge which was beautiful, but the colours haven't come out in the photographs.

We swam in the rain at Edith Falls.

We got soaked at Pine Creek when it rained all night and was still raining the next morning so nothing had chance to dry out, the car and tent were soaking. But we enjoyed Pine Creek, we drank the cheapest "schooners" of beer and had delicious home made snickers ice cream!

We headed on to Kakadu National Park where we saw rock art which had been painted by aboriginal people who lived in Australia upto 50,000 years ago. We were pretty impressed by this until we read that much of the art had been touched up in the 1960's by local people to keep the art looking fresh!

Last night we got caught in a terrible storm, there was lightning all round us and the rain was so hard we couldn't see the road in front of the car. It felt like we were about to be struck by lightning any moment! We decided not to camp and checked into a dry room!

We went for a walk in the wetlands the next morning.

And climbed up to Ubirr lookout between rainstorms! The lookout had 360 degree views and was one of the most brilliant landscapes we've ever seen, though you can't see all the brilliant colours in the photos.

Some like it hot

With temperatures reaching 40 degrees and humidity hitting 80% Selina has understandably taken me to three hot springs in the last 24 hours. You might be familiar with hot springs in countries where steam comes off the springs as it hits the cold air! Not in Aus! Here the water tends to be COOLER than the air temp!! But crikey they are fun!

Last night we settled into our campsite in Katherine, then trundled off to the local hot spring. After a lot of bad navigation by me (I blame the poor local map quality!) we got to the springs just before dark, after watching the most amazing sight of something like 100,000 flying fox bats flying up the river at sunset, wow!! We ended up sharing our "tub" with a couple of true ozzies in their late 20s. It was really interesting getting their perspective on current life and relations with local Aboriginies over a couple of tinnies.

Today we went 100km south to visit some truly natural springs. We swam in a lazy river in Bitter Springs which was surrounded by green slime (algae) which was hard to avoid, then we went on to Mataranka Thermal Springs which had translucent blue water:

We're now ready for the wonders of some national parks that are meant to be open and then on to Darwin. We are hearing of a category 2 cyclone heading our way, but hopefully it will have calmed down by the time it reaches us and not impact us.

20 Sydney Harbours

Lake Argyll gave us another highlight from Australia. Britain might have mind blowing history, but Australia doesn't half do nature! I keep finding myself saying "that's the most amazing XXXX I've ever seen" and I'm not talking Castlemaine!

Lake Argyll holds 20 times the amount of water in Sydney harbour. It is the second largest lake in the Southern Hemisphere. Basically it's bloody massive! We went on a tour of the lake and we saw so much wildlife: baby crocs, rock wallabies, kangaroos, pelicans, archer fish, catfish and bush turkeys. For me, the most fascinating were the cattle that had lived on one of the islands in the lake since they were cut off from mankind in 1971. No GM influence and they still had four legs and two heads!

We stayed in a caravan site with the nicest pool we've ever seen. It was an infinite one with the water merging into the distant lake water:

The overnight involved a lot of lightening and thunderstorms which we watched from the infinite pool. Lightening and big open space of water - hmmmmm!!

1,000 km later....

Due to the bush fire season hitting full speed and the wet season starting early, the drive from Broome to Kununurra passed pretty uneventfully. We drove a thousand km stopping off in a free 24 hour stopover and Halls Creek, but weren't able to go into any of the National Parks on route as they were all closed.

Kununurra was fun, there was all sorts to do. We went to Ivanhoe Crossing which is normally a road open to 4WD vehicles, but in the wet season:

No crocs spotted! We also went to a Rum distillery and a national park that was open(!) with some great mini Bungle Bungles:

We also got chatting to our neighbours on the camp site who ended up taking us to a really quiet spring in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. They reassured us they go there every week and we ended up staying there for a few hours swimming in the cave surrounded pool and drinking beers. You might think we're crazy, but we got to bed at 3am in one piece!! Too much fun (and no photos!).

Salt stacks, 80 miles of sand and camels

After fire ushered us out of Karijini, we moved on to Port Hedland. The place has a bad write up as only an industrial town with not much going on. We bucked the advice and stayed next to a golf course for a tenner(!), there were loads of warnings about snakes which was a little off-putting! All the sources of natural water had warnings about recent croc attacks, so we ended up in their Olympic sized swimming pool for a cool down. There was a nice art gallery and we had coffee in a real silver train carriage. Here's me in front of a big pile of salt, I am impressed honest, it's just the heat that has made me look so depressed!

We moved on with the extreme heat to 80 mile beach and got to see loads more turtles, flat back ones this time. We even got to see one laying eggs, amazing!!

Upon arriving in Broome. We decided it was just too hot, so checked into an air con room costing double a normal tent pitch. Worth it considering the 40 odd temperatures we are enjoying at the mo. We did all sorts in Broome, including being extras in a film called High Tide in the oldest open air cinema in the Southern Hemisphere (we went back the next night to actually watch a film!) and riding a camel at sunset!

It was such good fun riding the camels. We both had trainee ones that had been wild six months ago! We're still trying to figure out if they are better off now or not, at least they get carrots at the end of the ride.......

The walk was on Cable Beach which is regarded as one of the top five beaches in the world. We did love it, but pretty sure we have seen better (I keep thinking of the big red sun on Chowpatty Beach in India).

Lots of driving towards Darwin now, the rain has moved in .....

Bush fires

As the bush fires continued to burn, the national park stayed shut. So we climbed part of the way up Mount Bruce instead, the second highest mountain in WA.

There were 15 separate fires around the roadhouse we stayed at, some with bright flames we could clearly see.

A few days later we passed a bush fire that was right at the side of the road, you could feel the heat through the window, there was no one else around but the road was still open, so we just drove on as fast as we could!

Karijini adventures

This was one of our favourite days so far, we had a super time. First we trekked to the lookouts over the amazing gorges...

And then we followed marked trails down to swim in the water at the bottom. These marked trails were brilliant fun to follow, they took us through water, down rock faces, and ladders, over waterfalls and through streams and pools. We were the only people in the gorges as we are travelling in low season, so it was really exciting and peaceful, but we knew we had to be extra careful as help was so far away. It took 13 hours for the last person to get help!

These are the markers we followed through the gorges...

Climbing through a narrow passage in Weano gorge...

to handrail pool...

Swimming in handrail pool...

Pete swimming back through Hancock gorge. The amphitheatre is in the background, then we climbed through slippery Spider's walk to get to Kermit's pool.

A real adventure for us, we had a great time, then watched a bright red sunset back at the eco retreat and watched lightning flashing all around us.

The final piece of unexpected adventure came at about 9pm when the woman from reception came racing over to our tent to tell us there was an out of control bush fire heading our way. We were told to get in our car and drive to reception immediately to join the convoy of cars to be evacuated. We sat in a line of about a dozen other vehicles waiting for the police. Pete was worried that in our hurry to grab our passports and get in the car, we hadn't picked up the last of our dinner, and he was still hungry! And I was worried that in this convoy of vehicles, we were the only 2 wheel drive, all the others were big 4x4s with bull bars on the front capable of escaping much faster than we were, the nearest town was about 100km away and the first 20km was unsealed which meant we could only travel at about 15 miles an hour without getting a puncture, not much good for escaping raging bush fires! So we were both relieved when they told us the wind had changed direction, we weren't being evacuated after all. In fact the campers from the other campsite were later evacuated onto our campsite and the other campsite got burnt down in the night. 

The other gorge we wanted to see remained closed the next day and firefighters from Perth were being flown in to get the blaze under control. We were planning to camp at a layby at the side of the road last night but when we got there, it was deserted, everything was black and then Pete spotted thick smoke nearby, so we drove on! Tonight we are camping behind a petrol station, which sounds dangerous, but there is method in our madness, the Aussies are pretty laid back about the bush fires ("you just gotta let it burn mate") we figure if they are going to protect anything, surely it will be the petrol station. We are heading back towards the coast tomorrow!

No longer newlyweds!

After a relaxing few days in the small mining town of Tom Price, we drove to Karijini Eco Retreat in Karijini National Park to celebrate our one year wedding anniversary. We splashed out and stayed in a safari tent instead of our usual pop up tent, the tent sides were all net so you could see straight out into the bush.

We walked to Joffre falls lookout which was fantastic

And we hiked to the falls at the bottom which was steep and exhausting!

We had a lovely meal in the eco retreat restaurant and they gave us a complimentary lemon meringue pie as we were celebrating our one year anniversary.

Hotting up

As we are travelling further north temperatures are getting hotter and hotter. Heat of the day is from 9am until 5pm and Pete is usually sunburnt by 8.30am! It regularly reaches 40C in the day and hasn't got below 20C at night for days.

From Exmouth we headed inland and stopped after a couple of hours for lunch. We parked in a breezy shady spot, but it was too hot for us to get out of the air conditioned car! The breeze was like standing under a hot hair dryer! That night we camped for free in a rest area at the side of the road, it was the first place you were allowed to have campfires, so we lit one, but were inundated with bugs as we were the only light source for miles around. It was too hot for any grass to grow, so we camped straight on the rocky ground which had absorbed all the suns heat. It was like sleeping on a hot plate, we got no sleep at all and left early the next morning. 

We camped in Tom Price for 2 nights. It was still hot, but camping on grass made night times much more comfortable.

Exmouth

We stocked up our supplies in Exmouth (food, water, fuel, new flip flops and a new torch) and camped in the bush for 2 nights in the National Park at Ned's camp. We went bird watching from a bird hide in the mangroves at sunset which was great fun until the mosquitos came out. We couldn't get the mosquito coil lit quickly enough! We walked along Yardie Creek gorge looking for rock wallabies...

 and went snorkelling at Turquoise Bay which was beautiful.

We went whale watching and didn't see a thing!

And watched the sun set from the light house:

But our biggest adventure was turtle spotting! We went and sat on the beach in the dark clutching our torch and waiting patiently for the nesting turtles to climb out of the sea and up the beach to lay their eggs in the sand dunes behind us. Our patience paid off and we saw two massive turtles, the first turtle knew we were there and went back into the sea without laying her eggs, but the second one walked right up the beach and laid her eggs behind us. We then had to drive back to the tent in the dark which took us over an hour as we had to drive so slowly as there were sooooo many roos.

Beautiful Coral Bay

The lady at the tourist information office recommended a detour from our journey to a small beach called Coral Bay. We thought we would take a look at the beach and maybe stay for a couple of hours for a swim, but it's really beautiful and we have checked onto a campsite for 4 nights! It is the nicest beach we've seen with white sand, warm turquoise water and coral you can snorkel to from the beach. We've seen shoals of fish in the coral and brightly coloured tropical fish. And we've fed some massive fish that swim around your legs while you're paddling. The weather is brilliant, it's really hot in the day, but is fine in the shade and it cools down nicely at night so it's comfortable to sleep. And the seafood and cold beer is excellent!

One night we walked right around the bay to the next beach. We sat and watched the sunset on the deserted beach and waited for it to get dark in the hope that we could see turtles. It got pitch black with no moon at all, so we couldn't see a thing! We gave it up as a bad job and it took us the better part of an hour to walk the 4km back to Coral Bay as we didn't have a torch!

Long drive to Carnarvon

We had a scare with our petrol today. The woman in the petrol station told us they had run out of petrol and wouldn't be getting any more until next week, and the closest petrol station was 130km away. We worked out we had enough fuel to get 100km but weren't too sure about the last 30km,  we thought we were going to stay in town for an extra week longer than planned..... until we walked around the corner and saw her competitor next door had plenty of unleaded! 

We filled up and did the most driving ever today - 400km in one day! We did about 2 hours each on very long straight deserted roads.

Keeping our eyes peeled for kangaroos at all times!

We stayed on a spotless campsite in Carnarvon for 2 nights, we had fish and chips on the seafront, went to a monster garage sale and a car boot sale!

Dolphin mania

We arrived in Shark Bay, a world heritage listed area and spotted marine life straight away. We saw dolphins with our binoculars from this lookout...

Then we went to a board walk at Eagle Bluff and saw lots of sea birds, small sharks, rays and possibly a turtle, but we're not quite sure, he was a long way away!

We spent a balmy evening camped on the beach in a wilderness campsite near Denham. It really was in the wilderness, there were only 4 pitches on the whole site! It started off with just us on the site in the middle of no where with no other signs of life, including no water, no toilet nor any other facility. We cooked supper on our camp stove, then sat in the tent looking up at the stars and getting slightly twitchy about the different noises coming from the pitch black! Then at about 9pm two cars rolled up nearby and decided to have a party until 2am! Hmm, not so relaxing. I did the classic British trait of moaning about it all night and not doing anything about it!!! Poor, long suffering Selina.

The next day made the sleepless night worth every second. We went up to Monkey Mia at the crack of dawn and volunteered with feeding the dolphins. Wow, great fun. Here's Selina about to call out people to come and give her dolphin Shock a fish:

We saw loads of dolphins and I got to feed one called Nicki! We carried on the day with a dip at Little Lagoon (our first swim in Australia) very shallow and warm and possibly the most boring attraction in Oz......stromalites! They are supposedly 3.5 billion years old, but we didn't think the short walk from the car in the sizzling sun was worth it, sorry LP!